A Watershed Year by Susan Schoenberger Page B

nothing, knowing Angela needed to talk.
    “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? But I cannot be bothered to cook an egg for just one person, and Vern won’t touch anything but Kix. So that’s what I eat, too. Kix. These bland little corn balls. And I’m a vegetarian, so I could use the protein.”
    “So get over it and make yourself some eggs.”
    “The loneliest sight in the world—the whole entire world—is just one egg in the frying pan.”
    “So make two.”
    “Too much cholesterol.”
    They walked the rest of the way up the hill, discussing cholesterol and how you couldn’t eat anymore without wondering if the food would kill you. Lucy briefly thought about Harlan’s cancer, the cause of which would never be known. Memories of Harlan had become less painful, she noticed, since she had started receiving his e-mails. He hovered now, returning to her thoughts sometimes in vivid flashes, but more often just coloring the air, resting on her skin, infiltrating her hair. As Angela explained the philosophy behind her new obsession with protein, Lucy wondered if Harlan perceived being there at the same time, and in the same way, that she sensed it.
    She left Angela at the administration building on her way to Arts and Humanities to collect some papers to grade, work she would fit around decorating Mat’s room. In her mind, the room had to represent all she could offer to a small child; it had to convey, the first time he saw it, that he would be cared for, comforted, loved, even spoiled to a degree. Even in its strangeness, it had to communicate that a place had been saved just for him. It had to be a room he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave. It had to be perfect.

    THE PACKAGE CONTAINING Mat’s wallpaper was on her porch when Lucy got home. She opened it and stretched out several feet of the roll, admiring the glossy, sparkling fish on the deep blue background. She had never tried wallpapering before, but it was a small bathroom, and she had purchased a book at Home Depot promising step-by-step instructions.
    The next morning, she had a quick cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, thinking of Angela’s Kix, and then started in on the bathroom, spreading her supplies across Mat’s bedroom floor: tape measure, yardstick, pencil, paste, brush, wallpaper, X-Acto knife. She saw that she could fit two full sheets of paper from floor to ceiling on the wall opposite the door. Then she would have to piece the rest together around the toilet and the mirror and sink. She scanned the first page of the book and then stretched out her roll, piling books on one end to prevent the paper from curling.
    She brushed the back of the first long piece with paste. But when she stood up, she realized that she wasn’t tall enough to reach the top of the wall. She stepped on the edge of the tub and tried to paste it up from a slight angle. The top was more or less straight, but a large bubble appeared in the middle, and she couldn’t seem to smooth it out. She pulled that piece off the wall and wadded it up, tossing it in the corner.
    An hour and a half later, she realized that she couldn’t do this by herself. Not only was she apparently incapable of cutting a straight line, but she couldn’t hold both ends of the paper and smooth it at the same time.
    “They should have a label on the front of the book: two people required,” Lucy told Angela on the phone. “I ruined so much of the paper, I’m not sure I have enough to finish.”
    “Okay if I bring Vern?”
    “Sure,” she said. “But won’t he be bored?”
    “He’s got a Game Boy. He’s never bored,” Angela said. “I’ll be there in a half hour. Have to find my tools.”
    Lucy waited for Angela and Vern at the dining-room table with her feet on another chair. She took in the living room, with its miniature gas fireplace, wondering why she never sat in front of it. Would that change, she wondered, when there were two people living here instead